Miles with Maggie Archives - Nomadic Research Labs

by Steven K. Roberts Santa Cruz, California February 11, 1990 The photo above is by Maggie Victor, from post-earthquake Santa Cruz in 1990. Titled “Where old bicycles go to die,” it was published in the Nomadness journal as a sort of graphic counterpoint to the high-tech BEHEMOTH… though the project yet had so much uncertainty that…

Here’s a fun bit of personal technomadic history from 1990… an earnest attempt to broaden the nature of my adventure by building a community of fellow wanderers with a wide range of skills. The possibilities were enchanting, and this document generated loads of interesting correspondence while BEHEMOTH (the third bike version) was in development. Although…

On this date, something huge happened… shaking me to the core. It was the Loma Prieta earthquake, and I was living in Santa Cruz, working on what would become BEHEMOTH. The HF ham radio in the trailer was working (Icom 725). We had no power for weeks, phones were out, and cellular was yet rare…

This little snippet from my Miles with Maggie series (#52) took place two months before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that shattered our newfound Santa Cruz complacency. The foreshock impressionistically recorded here was but a teaser… yet deeply intimate somehow, coming as it did on the edge of sleep. The impact on the psyche was…

by Steven K. Roberts Milpitas, California July 20, 1989 Photo above: June Moxon with crew in Enchanted Slipper on Slimy Slope Eureka, California Kinetic Sculpture Race ’89 These are the times that make all the others worthwhile. Cold, misty wind. Surf rumbling in the dark; fresh thick Humboldt beer the color of night foaming in…

by Steven K. Roberts Milpitas, California May 6, 1989 Somebody on the Net recently asked me what my days are like. The popular image, I’m sure, is of a bustling Winnebiko lab with scurrying white-coated technicians fitting glittering surface-mount subassemblies onto a frame of high-tech composites and tightly laced bundles of optical fiber and coax. Surrounded…

This was published as Chapter 49 in the Miles With Maggie series on GEnie. The Winnebiko III was not yet named BEHEMOTH, and I had just settled on Nomadic Research Labs as a proper formal name for my business (which had been Computing Across America for a few years). The story below is the first…

an intimate glimpse of the passion driving the technomadic quest for freedom. by Steven K. Roberts Palo Alto, California December 7, 1988 Maybe it’s the Pink Floyd. Wordless memories overtake the present, obscuring it, confusing it, rendering the computer puzzling even while practiced fingers perform their familiar little dance. Perhaps madness lurks herein: time is…

by Steven K. Roberts Palo Alto, California November 3, 1988 (photo above by David Warman) I have to stop now, ignoring the jazz improv in the next room the food, the naked poolsplashes of frolicking loonies, the whirling articulate sounds of synthesizers, the interactive video, the party. Yes, I’m closing my senses to the play of…

by Steven K. Roberts From Montana to Washington September 25, 1988 Listening to a sampler album, I am taken in by texture… only to be cheated time and again by fade-outs, false resolutions, and a sort of musical sleight-of-hand designed to leap from intro to outro without wasting a moment in subtlety. In the middle…

Miles with Maggie

Immersed in Santa Cruz

Call to Nomadness

The Loma Prieta Earthquake

Naked at the Epicenter

The Midnight Attack

Standing in the Window

Designing the Winnebiko III

Dangerous Influences

Hackers 4.0

The Hobo Concerto